Two sides of a finite marriage market engage in costly investment and are then matched assortatively. The purpose of the investment is solely to improve the quality of the match that trader can attain in the second stage. The paper studies the limits of equilibrium of these finite matching games...

Agents on the same side of a two-sided matching market (such as the marriage or labor market) compete with each other by making self-enhancing investments to improve their worth in the eyes of potential partners. Because these expenditures generally occur prior to matching, this activity has...

In the context of the Beckerian theory of marriage, when men and women match on a single-dimensional index that is the weighted sum of their respective multi- variate attributes, many papers in the literature have used linear canonical correlation, and related techniques, in order to estimate...

We measure friction in the matching of students and law schools as the number of unnecessary student applications and school admissions that have to be undertaken per actual matriculation. We show that friction increases with student and school attractiveness, but decreases for top schools and...

Consider Becker's classic 1963 matching model, with unobserved fixed types and stochastic publicly observed output. If types are complementary, then matching is assortative in the known Bayesian posteriors (the 'reputations'). We discover a robust failure of Becker's result in the simplest...

We argue that using wage data alone, it is virtually impossible to identify whether Assortative Matching between worker and firm types is positive or negative. In standard competitive matching models the wages are determined by the marginal contribution of a worker, and the marginal contribution...

This paper attempts to explain the decrease and reversal of the education gap between males and females. Given a continuum of agents, the education decisions are modelled as an assignment game with endogenous types. In the ...rst stage agents choose their education level and in the second they...

We present sufficient conditions for monotone matching in environments where utility is not fully transferable between partners. These conditions involve complementarity in types not only of the total payoff to a match, as in the transferable utility case, but also in the degree of...

We produce a model with pre-marital schooling investment, endogenuos marital matching and spousal specialization in homework and market production. Schooling investments generate two kinds of returns in our framework: a labor-market return due to the education premium and a marriage-market...

There is a positive and significant correlation of many traits, such as age, religion, socioeconomic status, and education, among spouses. Becker (1973) shows that positive assortative matching – which results in a perfect correlation of traits in spouses – is optimal if the traits...